ESSAY

ESSAY; How Many Divisions?

By William Safire

Published: November 9, 1989

WASHINGTON—
While Americans strain to name the forthcoming meeting of the superpower leaders (from the ''Saltwater Summit'' to the ''Seaborne Summit'' to ''the last cruise of the Love Boat''), a summit session of more historic proportions is being ignored: the first meeting of the leader of what used to be called ''godless Communism'' with the Holy Father of the Roman Catholic Church.

Mr. Gorbachev's mission to the Vatican, scheduled to take place the day before his Club Med sessions with Mr. Bush, has a clear political purpose. The Soviet leader wants papal help in calming the restive Ukraine.

Ukrainian Catholics number more than five million; in recent weeks, tens of thousands of them have been demonstrating in the western Ukraine, a large part of which used to belong to Poland.

In 1946, to cut the ties to Rome of the dwindling Soviet clergy, Stalin ordered the Russian branch of the Orthodox Church to forcibly assimilate the Ukrainian Catholic, or Uniate, Church. A year before, at the Potsdam conference, the Soviet dictator said scornfully to Winston Churchill: ''How many divisions did you say the Pope had?''

It now appears the Pope has more than a few divisions in the streets of Lvov and other smoldering cities of great concern to Stalin's successor.

Tass recently denounced ''illegal acts by Uniates against Orthodox clergy and believers'' at the Transfiguration Church in Lvov, a charge the Ukrainian human rights activists derided. Ethnic tension combined with religious disputes could ignite a rebellion.

The Uniate has been operating underground. The Vatican recently directed several priests, perhaps secret bishops, to surface and to speak out for legalization of their church; others have remained underground in the event of a crackdown.

Mr. Gorbachev has a specific deal in mind. Come to Moscow and other Soviet cities on an official tour, he will say; talk of peaceful change to your co-religionists in the Ukraine, and in separatist Lithuania as well; urge them, as Cardinal Glemp did in Poland years ago, to be patient and not to seek to overthrow the political regime.

''He wants the Pope to be a calming influence,'' says Zbigniew Brzezinski, who knows a bit about Poles and Popes and just reported to President Bush after a trip to Poland and the Soviet Union. ''Gorbachev needs an armistice with the West in the cold war he knows he's losing.''

What inducement will the Soviet leader offer the Pope? Simple: the undoing of Stalin's forced amalgamation and subjugation.

If pressed, the Soviets will get specific about opening Catholic schools and returning seized church properties. To symbolize his broad-mindedness, Mr. Gorbachev might visit the exhibition of old Russian icons on display in the Vatican this month; the era before Lenin, this will say, was not such a dark age.

Pope John Paul will understand the Kremlin leader's political motive, but will think in primarily long-range religious terms: this could be a historic moment in the millennium-old schism between Rome and Byzantium, and the Pope has St. Peter's fish to fry.

The Vatican sees the Orthodox church in schism, but not in heresy. Schism is an organizational dispute, a challenge to hierarchy; heresy is a more fundamental theological clash, such as begun by Martin Luther. The Pope will want to use the opportunity offered by Mr. Gorbachev as a lever to help end the schism in the church.

With that theological motive, he is likely to strike a political deal. Pope John Paul has already sought to posi-tion himself equidistant from what his encyclical called ''the structures of sin'' - his equating of ''the all-consuming desire for profit'' of the capitalists versus the ''thirst for power'' of the collectivists.

If this serene equivalency is indeed the papal mindset; if he sees no great moral difference between the systems of East and West; if, as he has written, he sees imperialism growing out of both capitalism and Communism - then what is to stop him from making the best deal he can for the free operation of the Catholic church in the western Ukraine and Lithuania?

Not a thing. That's why I think he will agree to help cool the fervor for independence now sweeping through the breadbasket of the Soviet Empire, the one area that Moscow cannot afford to lose. Vatican diplomats will point out with logic that such patience paid off in Poland.

But the right to worship is best protected by nourishing democracy and not by stabilizing totalitarian regimes. The Pope, in his summit meeting on land with Mr. Gorbachev, should not diminish the momentum toward political freedom in accepting the offer for religious toleration.